Opportunity knocks
Sometimes when opportunity knocks, you have to tell it to come back later.
Such was the case for the Resta clan in 2001, although they couldn’t possibly foresee how meaningful a visit from a couple of Mormon missionaries would prove to be.
“I wasn’t there at the time,” recalled Luigi Resta when the young men first visited his Petaluma, California home. “My wife was there, and she told them to come back later.”
As missionaries tend to do, they returned. This time, Luigi was around.
“We said, hey, no proselytizing. You can’t bring your book inside the house. Happy to have you sit in the backyard. We’ll feed you food,” Resta offered. They accepted the invitation.
In time, the Restas grew close with one of the young men, Kelly Stowell, (siblings Kip, Kyle, Cami, Caralee, Coy, and Karin). When he finished his mission and returned home, Kelly asked if he could bring his family from Utah to see Northern California. Luigi was happy to oblige.
“We hosted them for lunch on our back porch,” he remembers. “I made some pasta.”
Neither party can recall what kind of pasta it was, but it must’ve been pretty good. Luigi’s family used to grow garlic, after all.
Kicking down the door
The father of that door-knocking young missionary happened to be Dennis E. Stowell, Iron County commissioner and soon-to-be Utah state senator. Stowell grew up on a farm in a remote part of Nevada where he learned to appreciate the value of renewable energy, which jived well with Luigi Resta, who cut his teeth in a self-described “off-grid hippie town” called Bolinas. Luigi remembers locals would steal signs directing outsiders to Bolinas because they wanted to stay as undiscovered as possible. He was raised on California’s first organic farm, and Luigi’s family still lives on the same property.
At the time, Resta was the managing director of Norwegian firm Scatec Solar’s North American efforts, and he was seeking entry into the U.S. market. The two got to talking about what it would take to make a utility-scale project work in Utah.
Finding the perfect location would be key. Thankfully, they didn’t have to look far.
“It just so happened we had the perfect property to accommodate it,” Kelly Stowell recalls.
Years after Kelly’s first knock, his father and Luigi Resta’s team devised a plan for a solar farm to be constructed on a 632-acre plot of land owned by the Stowells and neighbor Tim Tennis, conveniently located just outside of Parowan near a Rocky Mountain Power substation.
Red Hills Renewable Energy Park would become the state’s first utility-scale solar facility when it was commissioned in December 2015, more than doubling Utah’s solar footprint.
Dennis Stowell wouldn’t live to see it finished. The Republican state senator fought a valiant battle with cancer before it took his life in 2011, but the site (now under new ownership) continues his legacy by providing clean energy long after his departure from this mortal coil. The solar farm includes a visitor’s center bearing his name.
“My dad was a leader and a visionary, especially when it came to renewables,” his son Kelly recalls.
“He was absolutely dedicated to water rights, the rural economy and lifestyle, and preserving the agricultural roots of our state,” said Senate President Michael Waddoups in a statement following Dennis Stowell’s death.
In those ways, Luigi Resta carries his torch, too. And he’s since spread its flame all over Utah.
Episode 59 of the Factor This! podcast features Luigi Resta, a clean energy industry veteran and president of rPlus Energies, a developer of utility-scale solar, wind, battery storage, and pumped hydro projects. Resta breaks down the impact of FERC’s interconnection reform plan and shares his vision for the policy battle still ahead. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Awakening a renewable energy giant
Utah is an O.G. in the clean energy game, particularly hydropower generation. The state boasts 29 utility-scale hydro plants, and the majority of them are still utilizing generating units that are more than 60 years old, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The 1.2 MW Granite Hydroelectric Power Station southwest of Salt Lake City is the state’s oldest, built in 1896 to provide electricity to the city’s streetcar system.
Hydropower produced about 8% of Utah’s renewable generation in 2023 (roughly as much as its growing geothermal industry did), but wind and solar have since taken over the heavy lifting. Utah’s five wind farms accounted for 10% of the state’s renewables in 2023, surpassing in-state hydropower for the fourth time since 2016, per the EIA.
Solar generation made up the rest, totaling nearly 75% of Utah’s clean resources, and was nearly 50 times greater than in 2015, the year Red Hills Renewable Energy Park was commissioned. Solar energy, abundant out West, has accounted for around 93% of Utah’s added generating capacity since then. Utah began 2024 with the 14th-most solar generation capacity in the United States, more than 2,440 MW, with at least another 457 MW scheduled to come online by 2025.
Luigi Resta will have a heavy hand in that.
After his stint with Scatec Solar, he worked with Blackstone before taking some time off. A “walkabout,” if you will.
“Clarity of vision came,” Resta revealed. “I really wanted to work with a family office doing commercial real estate that understands how important a handshake is with a rancher or a farmer.” (The stuff kids dream of!)
In 2018 Resta founded rPlus Energies to focus on developing new utility-scale renewable energy sites. The company’s portfolio now spans more than 30 projects across 15 market areas in the U.S. (including solar, wind, pumped storage hydro, and solar plus battery) representing nearly 13 GW of new renewable capacity and more than 60 GWh of storage capacity.
As a rancher or a farmer might tell you, ground that has already been tilled is easier to work with the next time.
That has proven true in Utah for rPlus, which reached commercial operation on its first solar site in 2022, the 104 MW Graphite Solar Project in Carbon County. In Iron County, home of Red Hills, you’ll find another rPlus venture- the 240 MW Appaloosa Solar 1, which is soon to be followed by Appaloosa Solar 2 + BESS.
Other Utah clean energy endeavors cover the company’s utility-scale project page, but none stand out quite like the billion-dollar baby of the bunch, one of the largest solar plus storage projects under development in the U.S.
The Green River Energy Center
This month, rPlus Energies broke ground at the Green River Energy Center (GREC), a 400 MW solar and 400MW/1,600 MWh battery storage project in eastern Utah’s Emery County that will supply power to PacifiCorp under a power purchase agreement (PPA).
Sundt Construction is the EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) contractor, EliTe Solar is supplying the solar modules, and Tesla will provide the battery storage system, which is four times larger than initially planned, at PacifiCorp’s behest.
The project secured more than $1 billion in construction debt financing and is making a sizable impact on Emery County’s economy, creating about 500 local jobs (some of which will be long-term) and solidifying the tax base in a historic coal mining community.
“They’re seeing some contraction in that market, and as a result, the loss of jobs and economic diversity,” noticed Resta, who said he’s personally proud of the impact the GREC will make in Emery County.
“It’s a continuation of a legacy that created the community and the culture that was there where we’re doing the work. To be part of that fabric takes time, because there’s resistance to renewables if you’re in a coal community, but with time and focus on stakeholder engagement, the fact that we can go in and add another 40-50 year component to the fabric of the community is really exciting.”
-Luigi Resta, president of rPlus Energies
Community engagement has been a staple of Resta’s success in Utah, dating back to his dealings with the Stowell family in Iron County. Renewable energy projects can be embraced by all ilks if approached properly, including right-leaning voters in red counties with Republican elected officials, as the Inflation Reduction Act has shown and industry veterans have demonstrated.
“This project is being built in rural Utah, by rural Utahns, and for all of Utah. When rural Utah thrives, the entire state prospers,” said Utah Governor Spencer Cox at the GREC’s groundbreaking.
Farming support for renewables
More than 70% of farmers are open to large-scale solar projects on their properties if system designs allow for continued agricultural production, according to a recent report by the Solar and Storage Industries Institute (SI2). The report, “Understanding Barriers to Agrivoltaics: A Survey Approach” is the first national survey to capture sentiment about solar on farmland from hundreds of farmers, solar developers, and utility stakeholders.
SI2’s findings ring true with rPlus’s Resta, who has encountered similar sentiment.
“In the end, the ranchers and farmers are the true sustainability people,” he reckons. “They’re multi-generational, forward-thinking, caring about the stewardship of their land for future generations. And what we’re there to do is the same thing, and so our job is to make sure that they feel like we’re there to do the same thing.”
He recommends developers make frequent touches in the community they’re building in, showing up to address concerns and explain what’s happening on the ground. Honesty and transparency are essential.
“So that it’s not something that’s secretive,” Resta offers. “It’s not going to have all these things that some of the rural communities are concerned about. Explain that this is generally passive.”
The SI2 survey is the first output of a larger research effort funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office’s FARMS program in partnership with the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), National Farmers Union, and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. Nearly half of solar developers surveyed believe that solar on farmland will make up a majority of their future business opportunities.
“This report shines a bright spotlight on the reality that farmers and ranchers can play a significant role in helping us keep the lights on with clean energy,” said SEIA president and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper. “This report confirms that, under the right circumstances farmers and solar developers want to work together, and our job now is to deliver the tools and resources they need to make that process easier.”
Keep shining
The Stowells never could convert the Restas to Mormonism.
“Eventually, they put a red ‘X’ on our door,” Luigi recalls. “They stopped coming back.”
But the culture made an imprint upon him that endures. Luigi says he was inspired by the Stowell family’s emphasis on community values, a staple he tries to bake into every project.
And just because the missionaries stopped knocking doesn’t mean the families fell out of touch.
“We’re still really close friends with the whole family,” smiled Resta, who can no doubt attribute some of his success to that first fateful visit in Petaluma.
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that Utah’s solar industry has surged since the elder Stowell blessed the Red Hills Renewable Energy Park. Now nearly 20% of the state’s total electricity generation comes from renewable sources. Utah generates about one-fifth more electricity than it consumes, making it a net power supplier to other states, including Idaho and California.
Even still, Utah is ripe for more solar development. Although it was the sixth fastest-growing state by population between 2020 and 2023, most of the state is sparsely populated, as about 80% of its residents live around Salt Lake City. According to the IEA, about 63% of Utah’s land is owned by the federal government (second-most to Nevada’s 80%), and chunks of it can be leased for development under the Western Solar Plan, recently bolstered to include an additional 1.1 million acres across a smattering of states.
Luigi Resta and rPlus Energies don’t need an invitation to recognize an opportunity.
“We’ve had zero load growth in the United States for the last 20 years, and now we’re seeing high single and double-digit load growth in almost every area,” Resta concludes. “It’s an opportunity to make big investments in infrastructure projects in these communities to transition to the energy of the future, and we’re part of it. We are doing that work.”
Since a lot of that work is in Utah, Luigi calls Salt Lake City home these days. That makes it pretty convenient for Kelly Stowell to visit, which he often does.
When he comes around, Luigi still makes pasta. He’s teaching his grandson to do the same, in case it ever comes in handy.
